Award shows, for the most part, suck pretty hard. They rarely, if ever, truly get it right. Each year, an awards show releases their nominees and each year, with childlike enthusiasm, we rush to read them off, hoping upon hope that our favorite piece of media made the cut. And like the rise and fall of the tides or the consistency with which Donald Trump insults minorities, we are routinely and predictably disappointed.

For the most part, this is because the voting pool for these award ceremonies are crotchety old white men who are too hard of hearing to have their ear to the cultural zeitgeist. The Grammys are especially notorious for making the most egregiously terrible decisions, particularly in more contemporary musical categories, like hip-hop or R&B. But the Grammys’ poor decisions are purely the result of ignorance – and perhaps institutional racism. The Emmys’ decisions, however, are based on an inherently corrupt voting process, making their awards show the biggest sham of all awards shows.

Here’s how it works: The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences is the group of people in charge of nominating, voting for and giving out awards at the Emmys, so when an award winner says “I’d like to thank the Academy,” this is the group they are referring to.

The people that make up this group are professionals that have some sort of career in making television – directors, cinematographers, costume designers, sound mixers, etc. – and even with their credentials, they have to pay quite a hefty fee to gain membership.

This is all well and good, of course. After all, who better to judge the quality of a television show than the people who make them? Surely, they know best. The problem is, though, that these people – who largely work on television networks or on specific shows – get to vote for their own shows, and are often goaded into doing just that by the networks they work for in exchange for them paying their membership fees.

This means that the shows on networks with the largest employee base will win most of the time. This explains why HBO, a network with more employees than any other network, wins so many Emmys every year.

It also explains why Jim Parson’s Sheldon, from Big Bang Theory – which is on CBS, one of the largest broadcast networks – wins Best Lead Actor in a Comedy almost every single year despite being serially unfunny and having much better competition (read: Louie or Alec Baldwin’s character in the dearly departed 30 Rock). And don’t get me wrong, Modern Family is a cute, witty show, but it sure doesn’t deserve to win Outstanding Comedy Series five years in a row.

This isn’t to say that shows on smaller networks don’t win. After all, Breaking Bad came away with an Emmy practically every year despite being on AMC. Even with network bias, The Academy has to recognize once-in-a-generation quality when they see it.

But Breaking Bad is the exception, not the rule. The game is still rigged heavily in the favor of large broadcast networks, and shows like Louie or Archer only have the most marginal chance at actually being recognized for the quality of their work.

Essentially, it’s a numbers game. When it comes to Emmy winners, the awards have nothing to do with the quality of a program and everything to do with the size of the network the program is on. So when you watch the Emmys this year, don’t go in thinking that you’ll get an accurate appraisal of today’s television programming.